Recently, social network games (hereinafter referred to as social games), which are games provided using a Social Networking Service (SNS), are becoming more common with the spread of high-end portable terminals such as smartphones. A social game is a game in which a physical user operating a terminal controls, via a communication network, a virtual user that exists in a virtual space established by a game server to play a game online while communicating with other virtual users existing in the same virtual space.
For example, one of such types of social games may be a game in which, depending on an action of the virtual user or a story, a single story or scenario is established by combining a plurality of game parts such as a quest part, a battle part, a combination part, and a gacha part to constitute a single game. The quest part may be a game part in which the virtual user acting in response to the operation of the terminal by the physical user sequentially completes events assigned to the virtual user in a quest including a battle or a mission (e.g., see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2012-24248).
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2012-24248 discloses that when a quest part, which is one of the game parts, is selected, the virtual user therein linearly selects and completes the events assigned to the virtual user in the relevant quest in a predetermined order.
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2012-24248 discloses that, when a quest part constituting a part of the game is selected, the virtual user in the quest part basically selects and completes the events assigned to the virtual user linearly in a predetermined order. Therefore, play in the quest part is limited to the selection of a “next” or “advance” button or a “return” or “retreat”button, and the physical user does not have a free choice of action over the virtual user.
The quest part of the related art is configured in such a manner that a plurality of virtual positions are arranged on a linear single path or arranged one-dimensionally, and each virtual user exists at each virtual position. Accordingly, the virtual user merely has an option of proceeding or returning along the single path with each virtual position being a base point. Therefore, since actions assigned to a virtual user are merely performed sequentially, a user operation of the terminal is limited to pressing down a button displayed on the terminal in accordance with an instruction from a server and thus the operation was repetitive. As has been described above, since the movement is along a single path and thus there is no change in the path of the movement, the user's feeling of enjoyment of an entire game including the quest part was decreased.
The present disclosure has been contrived based on the aforementioned disadvantages and it is an object of the present disclosure to provide a game server that can stimulate interest in the entire game by providing a variation in the travel path of a virtual user existing in a virtual space, a method of controlling a progress of a game provided by the game server, a non-transitory computer-readable medium and a game system.